Response Blog #3: To Blog or Not to Blog...

Our discussion last night on blogging in the classroom really got me thinking about whether or not blogging truly had a place in the classroom. Since the beginning of the class, I have been going back and forth on the usefulness of blogs and how I could incorporate them into my class. I think the most daunting task would be actually having my students set up their blogs. I teach about 120 students all year, and having to read and comment on 120 different blogs immediately turned me off of this whole idea. However, a few ideas surfaced during our class discussion that really changed my mind. One, I could assign “blog buddies” and each student would have another student that they would be required to check up on, comment on their blog, etc. This alleviates the stress of me having to constantly monitor all 120 blogs. Secondly, I could tell my students that I will be picking only 3 blogs (at random) from the entire marking period that I would grade. Students would be allowed to write more, but they would have to write 3. Lastly, I could simply focus on one class period and have them blog, thus limiting the number of blogs I’d be monitoring to about 25-30.

So, I have decided to use one of those ideas (I’m still figuring out which!) but I do plan on somehow using blogs in my classroom come September. I might get some trouble from parents about blogging but I can finally say with confidence, after our class, that blogs do have a place in the classroom. When researching the benefits of blogs in the classroom, I came across an article by David Huffaker, who expressed his belief that blogs promote literacy in the classroom. He states that blogs “promote self-expression, a place where the author can develop highly personalized content.” Moreover, he describes the idea of making blogs inter-disciplinary, which is a really powerful idea when you think about it. If our class discussion last night wasn’t enough, Huffaker’s stance on blogs definitely convinced me that this was a Web 2.0 tool that I needed to be using in my class.

I realize, however, that I have a long way to go. I would need to set up a clear AUP for my students if they were to be blogging. I’d need to model proper and appropriate blogging and commenting techniques. And lastly, I’d need to inform parents of the objectives I was striving to meet by using blogging (which, I think, Richardson models very well on page 13-15).

I could talk more about blogs, but I feel that I would be remiss if I didn’t mention something that happened to me in my classroom this past week, since it relates so closely to using the Internet in the classroom. My students were researching for a civil war project and I had set up a personalized Google search engine for them, had gotten a laptop cart for my classroom, and had gone over presentation techniques if students chose to use Power Point for their presentations. I thought everything was going well until the laptops stopped working. Out of the 15 laptops, about 10 of them didn’t work. Students who had saved their work the previous day could not reach their work. Some student’s flash drives didn’t work on certain laptops, and students who created Power Points at home were not able to access them from our school’s computers for some reason. Luckily, I had a book cart from the library with tons of great civil war books as a backup for students to get their research done. Nevertheless, the whole experience frustrated me because it seemed like technology complicated and jumbled up the education process when I intended it to facilitate and enhance it.

But, I’m happy to say that this frustration only lasted for that day. When reflecting on my lesson and the research fiasco, I realized that yes, incorporating this technology would be rocky at first, but I would learn ways to smooth out those rocky patches. For example, to avoid any flash drive mishaps, I encouraged students to set up a Google account, and upload their work to Google Docs. This way, they could access their work wherever they were. I also realized that some things are just out of my hands (like the laptops not working) and that I shouldn’t let that hinder my incorporating the Internet into my lessons.

Much to my relief, the next few days of research went smoothly. Students embraced the Google Docs idea, and some students even came up to me to tell me how that would make their lives easier in other classes. Overall, I realize that this was simply a bump in the road, and I’m not going to let one bad experience ruin my use of technology.